The Balcony

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by Dorothy Cameron Disney


  “John Hieronomo gave it to her,” said Hermine Ayres, “as an engagement present. Daisy was always very proud of a pitch pipe made especially for her by the finest jeweler in the state.”

  I hardly heard her. My hands were ice, as I stared and stared again at the portrait. All at once my shadowy suspicion became a fact.

  I recognized Daisy Witherspoon.

  Daisy Witherspoon was no longer young and gay and pretty; she was middle-aged and dowdy. She had lost her slenderness, her vividness and her distinction. She had bleached the dark braids that long ago had made her like a little queen, and had cropped them short. Her hair was now a raw and brassy yellow.

  Daisy Witherspoon was the woman who had stood in the cupola of my great-grandfather’s barn, and had waited in the groom’s room. She had made herself at home because she had been a guest—Amanda Silver’s guest.

  XXII

  WHEN DAN AND I PARTED, it was with a firm determination to inaugurate an intensive search for Daisy Witherspoon. It seemed to us that in her own person Daisy Witherspoon might be the key to the riddle of Aunt Amanda’s death. At the very least, she could throw further light upon Amanda Silver’s mystifying behavior, explain why she herself—a woman hated by the Hieronomos—had been installed as a guest. And I believed that Daisy Witherspoon was privy to the secret of the vanished fortune.

  How we were to trace Daisy was not exactly clear. We separated for the night to think and plan, and agreed to meet again the following morning.

  It was in the morning—I woke very early—that my own ideas began to crystallize. I woke, raised on my narrow cot and gazed toward the bed where Patience slept. Only one who knew the Hieronomos could understand why I had not dared suggest that I change my room, and why she had not suggested it. Throughout our case, the Hieronomos saw only what they wanted to see, and spoke only on the topics that they chose. No member of the family had cared to mention what must have been paramount in each one’s mind—my almost outrageously open departure with Dan Ayres, and my lengthy call upon the house next door. They had passed it by in silence as though it had never happened.

  Only into such a household, it seemed to me, could Amanda Silver have introduced a secret guest.

  If Daisy Witherspoon had stayed in Hieronomo House for a period of a week—or during the time that Aunt Amanda had locked her bedroom door—she had consumed a certain amount of food. She must have ventured forth occasionally for exercise. I myself had seen her in the cupola of the barn. It seemed to me that the Frawleys almost certainly must have been aware of another person living in the house, locked door or no. Patience might not have spied Daisy through the keyhole, but she had declined to identify the pitch pipe. Amos? Did Amos also know? I remembered how startled and uneasy he had been when I mentioned the woman with the brassy hair. And then suddenly it struck me that Amos would be the logical person to find in the barn, and that, as she waited there on Friday, Daisy had expected someone. Was it Amos?

  It was scarcely six o’clock when I crept from bed and stole from the house. The morning star still gleamed, a solitary beacon, in the thin and stuffless light of breaking day. Across a morass of slush and mud I picked my way toward the barn. I was by no means sure of how I intended to approach Amos, but I hoped that the moment would lend me inspiration. Once I saw him, I could better gauge my form of questioning. Determinedly, I sloughed ahead.

  The winter garden had almost disappeared in mud and melting snow. Robbed of the white, protecting blanket, the sweeping lawns showed brown and moist and soggy. The currant bushes lay bare and crushed and dead, the rifled bird house leaned at a crazy angle, pathetic and deserted. The mother snowbird had made other plans.

  Only the three tall pines that sprang from the barren rise some distance beyond the area of the lawns retained their beauty. They rose proud and straight and tall, overshadowing the jagged, rocky terrain that seemed to join them in a single unit. I remembered how Daisy Witherspoon had stared in that direction.

  But the pines were several hundred yards from the barn, and I was turning through the door. It was only by accident that I saw Amos. He looked so much like a rock himself; he was leaning over, but he moved and the movement caught my eye.

  I watched the shambling, loose-jointed figure, minimized by distance, straighten up. I couldn’t make out exactly what Amos was doing, but suddenly I wondered what business took him to that particular spot. Amos leaned again, and again he straightened. I called, and at once he started toward me. Before I could speak or put any question, the Negro began to apologize for the condition of his mud-splashed clothes.

  “I’ve been to the pines,” he said.

  “Yes, I know. I saw you there.”

  To my intense astonishment, tears welled up in his eyes. He raised one trembling hand to exhibit several thorny sprays of bayberries, thickly starred with crimson berries.

  “Miss Amanda, she loved bright, brave colors. She hated lilies and such-like flowers. I went to the rocks to pick the bayberries. Old Amos was going to the cemetery this afternoon.”

  I was embarrassed, and hence was voluble. “I thought—well, I’ve been curious—about the pines and rocks. That little rise. Because—well, never mind. I’ve not been out there but . . .”

  “Ain’t nothing there,” said Amos. He had that disconcerting habit of dropping in and out of cultivated speech, as the humor took him—a not uncommon practice with educated Negroes in the South. I suppose they like to please the white folks and make employers feel superior. I wasn’t pleased, somehow. Amos gazed mournfully at his bayberries.

  “I think I’ll walk out to the pines,” I said.

  I could have sworn that the Negro caught his breath, but he only said, “You’ll find it sloppy walking, Miss,” and extended for inspection a mud-caked boot.

  I hesitated.

  “You’re sure there’s nothing there to see?”

  “Not now, Miss.” He turned his large, sad brown eyes on me. “There’s things to feel, I suppose, if you’ve a mind and heart for feeling—and if you believe human beings, whatever the color of their skins, leave any record of themselves and of their hopes and dreams in the places where they’ve been. John S. Hieronomo, my dear dead master, used to hide runaway slaves out there.”

  For a moment I was confounded. I had a fantastic vision of a dozen terrified Negroes, flattened against the pines, crouched among the rocks. Despite a sketchy reading of many history books, the practical aspects of operating the underground railroad had not occurred to me. I knew enough to realize that the runaway slaves who had won their freedom by flight to Canada had traveled upward from the South by slow and tedious stages—sometimes, when pursuit was hot, lingering in one situation for many days. How had my great-grandfather fed his hunted guests? How had they slept? Aunt Amanda had not successfully concealed Daisy Witherspoon. How had my great-grandfather concealed a group that sometimes numbered twenty, each as dangerous to befriend as an escaping criminal? Surely he could not protect and shield his helpless charges in the open, where almost inevitably they would have been discovered by those whose dark business it had been to return bondsmen to their bondage.

  “Do you mean to say they—the—the runaways slept and ate and hid themselves out of doors?”

  He shook his grizzled head. “In the old days, Miss Anne, long before my time, there used to be a cave among them rocks. Sheltered by the pines. Might not seem like much to you or me, born to freedom, but I reckon it seemed mighty grand to men and women hunted like the animals of the field. My poor old mammy, who come this way from South Carolina, say it look like a palace.”

  “Your—your own mother stayed on this place?”

  “ ’Tis true. She came this route from the rice fields of South Carolina. All her life she remember your great-grandpappy. She speak his name with her dying breath.”

  “Is she mentioned in Great-grandfather’s book?” I asked inanely. I was astonished that I had never heard the story, that none of the others had ever spoken of what
must have been a real and binding tie between Amos and John S. Hieronomo.

  “My poor old mammy,” said Amos humbly, “wouldn’t be important enough to be named in any book, or to stick in your great-grandpappy’s memory. I reckon poor old Becky pass from his mind long before he first lay eyes on me. I never ask him.”

  I was dumbfounded. “Do you mean to say Greatgrandfather never knew that your own mother was one of the runaways who stayed on this place?”

  “I didn’t talk to him about it,” repeated Amos. He scuffed his shoe along the muddy ground. “A black man keeps his history to himself—he don’t bother white folks with it.”

  Again I saw tears in his eyes.

  I was afraid that he might turn and leave me there. I wanted more information—a great deal more. I was sharply interested in the existence of that cave, that secret hiding place. What did Amos mean—long before his time there used to be a cave?

  He said, “Your great-grandpappy with his own hands moiled and toiled and dug the cave—somewhere there among the rocks—and when Emancipation came, with his own hands he filled her in. Closed the opening over. Ain’t no sign of it nowadays, can’t tell even where it was. Even when my old eyes were young and bright like yours, ’twas gone. And better so, I reckon,” he finished somberly, “to close and blot out and forget all reminders of that dark and shameful chapter in the history of mankind.”

  He turned away to hide his working face. Amos was the son of a mother who herself had been a slave. In consequence, the conversation and the recollections it called forth, might be painful. I didn’t doubt the sincerity of Amos’ emotion, but for no particular reason I had become increasingly uncomfortable. I had meant to lead the interview that Amos had led. In some vague way, I felt that the old Negro had bested me in an unspoken but nonetheless definite contest of wills—his will and mine. I had come to the barn to question Amos about Daisy Witherspoon, and he had talked instead of my great-grandfather’s abolitionist activities. I fixed him firmly with my eyes. I cleared my throat.

  At that point, Amos leaned back on his heels and cocked his ear.

  “Did you hear something, Miss Anne?”

  I had indeed. In the stillness of the morning air rose a high and piercing whistle—a signal Dan and I had agreed upon the night before. Again the whistle, clear and shrill, floated over the high board fence.

  Amos moved hurriedly into the barn and I started toward the fence. Before I was halfway there, two things occurred to me almost simultaneously. One was that to Great-grandfather, his days as an abolitionist had not been dark and shameful but had been the brightest, proudest days of his long career. No John Hieronomo whom I had ever pictured would have filled in and closed over a cave where runaway slaves had been sheltered; my John Hieronomo would have turned the place into a personal shrine, and taken all his friends and callers to witness.

  My second thought was equally provocative. No undergrowth or shrubbery of any kind grew on the hard gray rocks beneath the sentinel pines. There were no bayberry bushes anywhere in that vicinity. Wherever Amos had plucked the graceful, crimson sprays, he had not plucked them on that barren rise.

  When I reached Dan—he was waiting impatiently at the opening in the fence—I had a plan of action all mapped out for us. I could hardly wait to recount the story of my interview with Amos and the inferences I had drawn from it.

  “In my belief, Dan,” I said, triumphant and excited, “the cave is still there. I think we should go to the pines at once, and search until we find it.”

  Dan demurred. “Unfortunately,” said he, “Amos told the truth about the cave. There isn’t any. Old John did destroy his handiwork years and years ago. It doesn’t sound like him, I’ll admit. Possibly, the old boy did have his finer feelings.”

  “But, Dan . . .”

  “Even when Mother was a girl,” said Dan, “the cave was gone. The neighborhood youngsters, in her salad days, used to make up searching parties hoping to stumble on the site. Kid stuff, maybe, but kids are thorough lookers. They never found or saw a thing. We can’t waste our time in . . .”

  “Waste our time!” I echoed indignantly. “I thought Daisy might be hiding in the cave.”

  Dan laughed indulgently. That annoyed me further. It was then he said:

  “I know exactly where Daisy is.”

  “You know!”

  “She’s in the logical place,” said Dan. “Or I think she is. I figured it out last night. Come on. Let’s go and prove me right.”

  But he wouldn’t answer any questions. He was mysterious, superior, highly pleased with himself—and in great haste. Almost before I knew what was happening, we were in his car and speeding toward Mount Hope.

  “Daisy couldn’t stay a minute in Mount Hope,” I protested, “without half the village knowing it.”

  “Suppose she had a friend. An old and devoted friend . . .”

  Abruptly, Dan pulled up before the village church. The sky was gray and overcast. No sun shone, and a nasty little wind was blowing across the central square that lay deserted in the early morning. The villagers were not yet astir. There was no one on the sidewalks, no one near the church.

  “When did Amos move to Hieronomo House?” asked Dan.

  “On Thursday morning,” said I, like a person in a dream.

  No one saw us as we slipped noiselessly into the church that stood always open to receive the troubled and distressed. Nothing can seem so quiet or so deserted as a church. This was a peaceful place with rows of empty pews and an empty altar. We spoke in whispers.

  “Where was Amos’ room?”

  “In the basement.”

  Dan grasped my hand and we tiptoed toward the stairs and started down. In the absolute silence, the sudden sound was almost shocking. The sudden sound of a piano. The sudden triumphant sound of a piano, badly out of tune, but yielding melody to sure and practiced fingers.

  I was ahead of Dan, and I saw Daisy first. The piano was in the corner of the dim and poorly lighted place. Daisy sat at the keyboard, preoccupied, intent. Around her was a row of little chairs where on Sunday, the Sunday School children sat. Behind her, partially hidden by a baize screen, yawned the door of the janitor’s room. But Daisy wore a hat, and beside her was a traveling bag.

  I think I must have caught my heel in the worn old carpeting of the stairs. At any rate, I stumbled. Daisy looked up, startled and alert. She rose slowly from the piano.

  “You!” she said. “Why are you . . .”

  “Daisy Witherspoon!” said I.

  I didn’t alarm her in the least. She looked perplexed, and that was all. My voice began to shake.

  “We’ve come to find out what you know about my great-aunt’s murder.”

  “I don’t know who killed her,” said Daisy Witherspoon. “I told you that the other day. I told you I wished I could help but that I couldn’t—that I was afraid I’d be accused. Since then . . .”

  “You knew about the gold.”

  “I didn’t get it,” said Daisy Witherspoon, bitter and emphatic. “Amanda Silver found that out, I guess. She . . .”

  We were standing face to face. Daisy’s eyes had been for me alone. Suddenly she caught sight of Dan. Her tone changed.

  “Listen, you. Both of you. You’d better leave and leave at once. I’ve made up my mind to tell everything I know. Is that clear? I’m telling everything.”

  “That’s all we want.”

  She turned to Dan.

  “You were in Hieronomo House on Wednesday afternoon. You were with Amanda Silver just before she died. I saw you there. And you’d better leave if you don’t want to meet Sheriff Glick. I’m expecting him at any minute.” We met the Sheriff on the stairs.

  XXIII

  “BY AND LARGE,” REMARKED SHERIFF GLICK, and glanced around the group, “there are too many amateur detectives in this case. Amateur detectives sometimes find themselves in highly awkward—not to say dangerous—positions. Cary, will you take charge of Miss Hieronomo, please.”


  Hiram Cary was the lantern-jawed deputy who had accompanied the Sheriff on the mission where he had expected to meet one person and had met three instead. The deputy gripped me firmly by the arm.

  Dan’s face turned white. He took a quick step forward.

  “Stand where you are!” said Sheriff Glick, and his soft voice was very hard. His eyes were green as ice. “You’re going with me. You and Miss Witherspoon. I’ve other plans for Miss Hieronomo.”

  Dan whirled on Sheriff Glick. “You’ve got no right to hold Miss Hieronomo. Anne has nothing to do with our being here. That was my idea. I’m to blame for everything. I . . .”

  “Don’t tell him anything,” I cried. “You didn’t kill Aunt Amanda, Dan, and that’s enough. Don’t admit to anything. We’ve still got a chance . . .”

  We had no chance even to talk to one another. The pressure on my arm increased. I was abruptly turned around, marched up the stairs and from the church. The deputy didn’t put me into handcuffs, but I think he would have liked to do it. A pair of handcuffs was in his pocket. The outline was visible through the cloth, as was the businesslike outline of a gun.

  An official car was parked at the curb. Cary thrust me inside, and himself climbed in. He leaned to jerk the curtains. But I saw the others leave the church—Sheriff Glick, and Daisy Witherspoon and Dan. The Sheriff was between the other two, and only he was smiling. Daisy looked anxious and subdued, and Dan’s face was like death. That was the last I saw of him. A moment later I heard them get into his car and drive away.

  Cary and I kept on sitting at the curb. The deputy took out a cigar and lighted it, and lowered the curtained window so that the smoke wouldn’t blow across my face. Occasionally he glanced at his watch. I stood that for fifteen minutes before I spoke.

  “Am I under arrest? And what is the charge?”

 

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